The average Drupal hosting stack is getting much more complex. The average high-performance Drupal stack might have Apache or nginx, PHP, HAProxy, Varnish, Memcache or Redis, SOLR and Tomcat, MySQL, and a CDN.

Each of these tools is great at a particular job, but the sheer number of daemons involved can have several adverse effects:

More configuration is needed to get developers a copy of the production stack for testing

Client system administrators may be less familiar with some of the new tools you wish to use to build out a site for them

More to install, more logs to check, more possible points in the stack to possibly have to debug when things go wrong

With that in mind, let's take a look at some alternative options around a leaner, meaner, open-source hosting stack. We’ll take a look at how much can be done with the following 4 tools:

PHP-PFM

nginx for reverse proxy caching, load balancing, and as a web server (we’ll also take a quick look at some of the more esoteric options that nginx offers, such as embedded lua programmability and the ability to connect to Redis and SQL databases, but those are a little outside the realm of keeping the stack simple.)